Productivity applications, such as Microsoft's OFFICE suite (which includes WORD and EXCEL), support interfaces with multiple reporting data sources. These data sources may include Object Linking and Embedding (“OLE”) data sources and Open Database Connectivity (“ODBC”) data sources. Such a productivity application may provide a user interface wizard through which a user can define a data source, specify a source location of the data source, and specify a target location for the data within a document of the application. For example, if the data source is a database, the data source may be defined by the network address of the database server and the source location may be specified by table name, row identifier, and field name (e.g., table name is “customer,” row identifier is “company name is Microsoft,” and field name is “stock quote”). If the application is a spreadsheet application, then the target location may be specified by column and row number (e.g., B10). When a user has the document loaded by the application, then the application may either automatically or upon user request update the document with data from the data source. In this example, such updating would retrieve the current stock quote for Microsoft and insert it in cell B10 of the spreadsheet.
Users of such productivity applications, however, are limited by the types of data sources that the developers of the applications are willing to support. There are currently many different types of data sources. Since the developers need to program the applications specifically to support each type of data source, it can be very expensive for a developer to support many types of data sources. Also, new types of data sources are being continually introduced. As such, even if a developer wants to support a new type of data source, there may be a considerable lag between when the data source is available and when the developer can release a version of the application that supports the new data source.